in Xerces-J 1.1.2, whe the document-class-name property is set with an another implementation of DOM than xerces one, there is a null pointer exception :
java.lang.NullPointerException at org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.startElement(DOMParser.java:1082) at org.apache.xerces.validators.common.XMLValidator.callStartElement(XMLValidator.java:705) at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner.scanElement(XMLDocumentScanner.java:1852) at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner$ContentDispatcher.dispatch(XMLDocumentScanner.java:1000) at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner.parseSome(XMLDocumentScanner.java:380) at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:861) at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:900) That work fine with xerces-J 1.1.1 -- Lionel